Remember the Christian militia folks from here in Michigan that were locked up not too long ago for allegedly plotting to kill state and local law enforcement officers? Well, it looks as though something similar is unfolding right now in Georgia, where four right-wing militia members have been arrested for planning attacks on IRS and AFT facilities. According to prosecutors, these men were inspired by the self-published novel of former Alabama militia leader Mike Vanderboegh. The novel, entitled Absolved, details the activities of underground militia fighters who, in response to gun control legislation and the threat of same-sex marriage, declare war on the federal government. Vanderboegh, who you might recognize as a Fox News “expert” on all things AFT, has denied that his novel was meant to serve as a how-to manual for domestic terrorists… Coincidentally, these four men who were arrested are from the small town of Toccoa, Georgia, where my one-day-a-year band wrote and recorded the song Kraken in 2007, which, to my knowledge, has never inspired anyone to do anything except leave the room.
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Like the home-grown, anti-government Christian terrorists before them, these guys have requested public defenders. I find that funny.
I read that they held their meetings in a Waffle House.
That’s not a joke, either.
OK, they met at Waffle House, that doesn’t mean that they might not have been dangerous. Men from Toccoa have a reputation for being fierce fighters. For those of you who don’t know, Toccoa was home to Camp Toccoa, a WWII paratrooper training facility. In fact, it was the first training camp for the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, whose Easy Company was subject of the non-fiction book and subsequent HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. (I cut and pasted that last part from Wikipedia.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3cbCpFnMac
From the NYT:
“There’s two schools of thought on this: go for the feds or go for the locals,” Frederick Thomas, 73, a Navy veteran who was described as the leader of the group was recorded saying to an F.B.I. informant. “I’m inclined to consider both. We’d have to blow the whole building like Timothy McVeigh.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/us/georgia-men-held-in-plot-to-attack-government.html
The “twinkie defense” worked. Why not the “monkey power” defense? Perhaps these old men could claim that they had suffered diminished capacity, having been subjected to the relentless plinking and wailing of the five-man aural terror cell.
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201111060002?frontpage